Symposium: Despair Is Too Much of a Good Thing

This article is in response to “Rescuing Freedom from Despair” and is part of the symposium on What Is Wrong with Conservatism and How Do We Make It Right?

If, as Jonathan Tobin writes, despair comes naturally to conservatives, it is in the same way that obesity comes naturally: on the whole, as the result of too much of a good thing—the good thing being what the Spanish philosopher Miguel Unamuno called “the tragic sense of life.”

That sense liberals don’t have. Liberals are constitutionally optimistic. History is a grand ascent toward Justice. We’re getting better (“progressing”) all the time. Once the human race sloughs off the knuckle-draggers, we’ll frolic our way toward Eden hand in hand.

Tobin, in “Rescuing Freedom from Despair,” edges toward such triumphalism in extolling American virtue:

If American exceptionalism means anything at all, it is that belief in individual liberty is embedded in the political DNA of American society. The collectivist and utopian impulse that has ravaged other societies . . . must always collide with that impulse, and the result of such collisions is an inevitable if not always swift victory for those who stand for more freedom against advocates of government as benevolent despot.

I want to stand with Mr. Tobin in this declaration—it has such gusto—but his strokes are too sweeping. Conservatives ought not to despair (it is, as William F. Buckley Jr. said, a mortal sin), but if they do, it stems from their crucial “tragic sense of life,” that constitutional hypersensitivity to the precariousness of his position. Conservatives are acutely aware that our gains are gotten incrementally, when gotten at all, and are always apt to be lost at a blow. We do not see history as an inevitable ascent toward Olympus but as a struggle to maintain the garden against never-ending sorties of encroaching weeds. We eschew talk of “victory” because we recall that, in T.S. Eliot’s words,

There is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that it will triumph.

The barbarians are always at the gates, and conservatives don’t presume that they will ever be stamped out. Rather, we accept that our task is simply to keep the flame of the eternal things burning no matter how close the hordes come.